How to Write Your First Resume in Six Steps

Your resume is a marketing tool unique to you and your experiences. Follow these six steps to develop a resume that reflects your experience, education, skills and one that will help you land an interview.

1. Record All of Your Experiences

First, brainstorm and document of all of your experiences. Include:

• Experience: Paid or unpaid jobs, internships, research experience, volunteering, community service
• Education: Your current degree program, high school diploma (only if <1 year out of high school), transfer coursework, dual credit, study abroad, honors, awards, scholarships, certifications, conferences, presentations
• Activities: Clubs, sports, community groups, church involvement, leadership experience
• Projects: Academic projects, personal projects, publications, professional development and self-paced courses

When you’re writing your first resume, you don’t need to focus on what to include versus what to leave out. You can make those editing decisions later.

Resume Pro Tip

Keep this list of experiences as your “running resume”. This is a version of your resume that includes everything you’ve ever done. As you gain more experience and the document becomes longer than one page, you can use it as a tool to copy and paste from to create more tailored versions of your resume while still keeping track of all your experiences in one place.

2. Use an CCR-Approved Template or Start with a New Document

Download one of our 1st Year Student Resumes or Resume Examples with Some College Experience as a template to start with or open a new Word document. University of Arizona students have free access to Microsoft 365 with a NetID. Important: Avoid templates from other sources where it is unclear if they’ve been professionally vetted.

Review your list of experiences and try to group similar experiences together to see how you might organize your document into sections. You should use your experiences to determine these sections and determine a heading title that best describes them rather than forcing your experience to fit predetermined headings from a template. Remember, this is a document that’s completely unique to you!

Read More: List of Example Section Headings

3. Write About Your Experience Using APR Format

Effective resumes use accomplishment driven bullet points to demonstrate your skills through your actions. For each experience, write your bullet points using the APR format.

Action + Project/Problem + Result

Try these steps to write your bullet points:

1. Think of one project you completed, a problem you helped solve, or a task assigned to you
2. Choose a verb that best describes the actions you took
3. Add in details that describe the project/problem
4. Include the result you achieved (add in numbers if possible!)

Read more: Write Impressive Bullet Points Using APR Format

4. Apply a Consistent Format

Whatever format you choose, make sure it’s consistent. Formatting should help organize the document to make it easy to read and make efficient use of the space on the page and use that formatting consistently throughout each section of your document. Important: Check for any spelling and grammatical errors.

Read more: Resume Formatting Do’s & Don’ts

5. Revise & Get Feedback

Once you have a good first draft of your document, you’re ready to get feedback, make edits, and upload to your Handshake profile. Here’s a few ways to make revisions to your document to get to your final draft:

• Review the Resume Checklist to see how your draft compares to resume best practices
• Make a 1:1 appointment to review your document with a CCR Career Education team member

6. Upload to Your Handshake Profile

In Handshake, the job search is a two-way street. You’re 5x more likely to be messaged by employers when you upload your resume and make it visible on your profile! View the instructions for how to upload your document to Handshake to upload the latest version of your resume and allow employers to find you when they’re looking to hire Wildcats.

Remember: